This talk presents SafeFS, a modular architecture based on software-defined storage principles featuring stackable building blocks that can be combined to construct a secure distributed file system. SafeFS allows users to specialize their data store to their specific needs by choosing the combination of blocks that provide the best safety and performance tradeoffs. The file system is implemented in user space using FUSE and can access remote data stores. The provided building blocks notably include mechanisms based on encryption, replication, and coding, each implemented as independent layers. We implemented SafeFS and performed in-depth evaluation across a range of workloads. Results reveal that while each layer has a cost, one can build safe yet efficient storage architectures. Furthermore, the different combinations of blocks sometimes yield surprising tradeoffs.